Posts tagged Apple
Apple iPad testing
Feb 26th
Students got their hands on an Apple iPad today – weeks before the product has officially been launched! We did some testing and compared the size of this new device with an iPod and a laptop. Overall impression was that the screen seems small for web surfing, but it is a fun gizmo.
If you are interested in trying out the iPad for free, follow this link for access 
iPad deconstruction
Feb 1st
The 6th grade spent the period deconstructing the marketing around Apple’s new iPad announcement.
We started with the official video that greets visitors to the Apple website. What does Apple want us to believe about the new device? How do they use music, backgrounds, demonstrations and interviews to convince us?
Next we broke up into groups to figure out if the iPad is a technological evolution or revolution. Every group clearly agrees that this is merely an evolution – as Abe pointed out, “it’s just an iPod Touch that won’t fit in your pocket.”
Could the iPad be a replacement for your home computer?
Where do we go from here?
Dec 14th
The 6th grade concluded Internet boot camp this week. Everyone is clear on why Billings provides computers and Internet access and their responsibilities as users. We took a moment to define some common terms that will be used throughout their middle school technology experiences.
Student definitions:
| Web broswer | an application used to connect to the internet. |
| Application (app, program) |
software that can be installed on a computer to complete a task. |
| Software | a set of instructions telling a computer what to do when it receives input from a keyboard or mouse. |
| Search engine | a website you visit using a web browser so that you can find information on the internet. |
The difference between a web browser and search engine has been murky in the past for some students. We reinforced our Microsoft Excel skills from STeM class to build a comparison chart:
| Company | Web Browser | Search Engine |
| Microsoft | Internet Explorer | Bing |
| Chrome | ||
| Apple | Safari | x |
| Yahoo! | x | Yahoo! |
| Mozilla | Firefox | x |
| Wolfram | x | WolframAlpha |
| Opera | Opera | x |
Tech in the News – Verizon v. AT&T
Dec 3rd
7th grade has been using tech all year to support LA and Science…today was a day to kick back and talk about all the amazing things that happen in the world of technology.
Today we talked about the mighty battle between Verizon and AT&T. AT&T has the iPhone, and pays Apple money for the right to have this cool device on their network only. Verizon has the best customer satisfaction rating for service (according to Consumer Reports) as well as a much larger 3G network in the USA. AT&T is mad about Verizon ads that point this out, so they are suing Verizon and they also made some new tv commercials starring Luke Wilson that say “AT&T is better”.
We talked about tons of interesting marketing ploys, competitive negotiations, and operating system constraints. The most lively discussions focused on:
- Cell phone companies have claimed colors as their own – Sprint=Yellow, T-Mobile=Pink, Verizon=Red, AT&T=Blue&Orange
- Cell phone companies are really becoming data service companies – most people use their phones for way more than just making calls
- Verizon just introduced Droid, a new phone that is supposed to compete with the iPhone. It runs Google’s Android 2.0 operating system.
Verizon attacks AT&T’s 3G service coverage
AT&T fights back
Are Google and Apple friends?
Jan 8th
First day back to tech and the 6th grade tackled what turns out to be a difficult question: Are Google and Apple friends?
Students agreed that Apple is a computing company and Google is an advertising company. They don’t compete for hardware (iPhone, computers, iPod, etc) but they DO fight for software users (Apple sells software, Google gives it away).
Students pointed out that Google’s web browser (Chrome) only works on PC, not on Apple computers. This makes us think that Apple and Google will work together to steal users from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
However, on January 5th, Google released a piece of software called Picasa for Mac, a direct competitor to iPhoto (the most popular free Mac photo organization/editing software). What does this mean? Is Google attacking Apple?
The 6th grade thinks that this will be a tough fight for Google. Apple computers come with iPhoto already installed, and for people that already use iPhoto, there isn’t a lot of reason to switch.
MacBook Air showdown
Jan 24th
Last week Apple launched a new laptop, the MacBook Air. This week in tech, the 6th grade split up into 3 groups and each team compared this new ultra-thin laptop to others on the market.
- Macbook Air
- OS Leopard
- $1799-$3098
- 2GB Ram
- up to 80GB storage
The competitors were:
- The OLPC XO laptop
- Linux OS
- $200
- 512MB Ram
- 2GB storage
- Apple’s standard MacBook
- OS Leopard
- $1099-$1499
- 1GB Ram
- up to 160GB storage
- Alienware’s Area-51 m9750
- Windows XP or Vista
- starts at $1699
- up to 4GB Ram
- up to 640GB storage
Students came up with some interesting comparisons – looking at price, size, features (webcams, peripheral ports, expansion capabilities, graphic cards, etc). They also made some surprising decisions when weighing all of the options. Ask your 6th grader for their opinion.
Apple introduces Leopard (Week 9)
Oct 29th
Today we focused on Tech in the News. The two biggest stories of the last week are:
Microsoft buys stake in Facebook for $240 million dollars. We used this topic to learn about social networking services, how they rely on large adoption to be successful and how they leverage their customer base to create revenue from advertising.
Apple releases new operating system. From this article, we defined the term “operating system” as software that has a set of instructions that tells a computer’s hardware how to talk to each other and tells other software how to talk to the computer. We talked about Apple’s marketing, how they focus on the uses of their products (not necessarily just the hardware specifications) and how they work to generate “coolness”. We watched clips from a 20 minutes introductory video, produced by Apple, and discussed whether the new features were revolutionary, evolutionary, or just good-looking.
Students in one class had enough time to actually play with Leopard and tested Spaces, explored Safari 3 and looked at the new finder, dock and Coverflow features.
